Pure

How to get a pure sugar rush

Blossom Road runs up a rustic mountainside. It’s rutty, unpaved, and in the winter you might have to hike up wearing crampons, the boot spikes mountain climbers wear.

Photo by Martin Marek on Unsplash

There are lots of maple trees around Blossom Road. Which is why it is the site of the no-name sugarhouse manned by journalist Peter Gregg and his Atlas-sized partner Bert Jones. The small wood structure, built by the two men and their dad band mates, lies at the bottom of a mountain in between Hebron in upstate New York and Rupert, Vermont.

This is where the two men launched their shared addiction: sugaring.

Sugaring, in case you are unfamiliar, is what us flatlanders know as making maple syrup.

Sugaring is a form of farming that does not require chemicals, fertilizers, or plows. All you need is a maple tree. Or a lot of maple trees. The more maple trees you got, the larger your sap supply.

And once you are tapping trees to make syrup, you’ll receive an agricultural exemption on your property tax. Sweet!

Photo by Kapil Viswanathan on Unsplash

The sugarhouse on Blossom Road looks like a rough-hewn barn with a big metal piece of equipment inside. This is where the sap from the maple trees is boiled in a vat in order to evaporate the excess water and condense the syrup.

There’s some other machinery involved, so it pays to have a mechanic’s know-how.

And a cold-weather farmer’s stamina.

Pure maple syrup is different than the stuff you buy at Costco. Which consists mainly of corn syrup, doctored up with maple flavoring. Pure maple syrup is the real deal. And pure maple syrup is in high demand these days. Eaters want their food natural and unadulterated, including their maple syrup.

Unfortunately, pure maple syrup is too often in short supply. Demand is up, supply is not always guaranteed, so prices are high.

Predictably, the large companies have stepped in, buying up the small-time manufacturers. Rich investors have purchased vast tracts of land full of sappy trees.

Despite the influx of the money men, however, there is still plenty of small-time sugaring going on in upstate New York and Vermont.

Peter and Bert’s sugarhouse is on a 25-acre vertical tract with fewer than a thousand tapped trees. Big Maple will tap twenty thousand trees, or a hundred thousand. That’s a lot of sap.

But there’s actually even more sap to be found. Scientists who study the matter believe sugaring is only taking around ten percent of the available sap each season.

Here’s why: climate change. At this point the time to extract is short and getting shorter.

There’s typically a six-week window in which to extract the sap: that spell between winter’s end and the start of spring. The sap runs when nights are below freezing and days are in the 40s and 50s.

The fluctuation in temperature creates internal pressure that gets the sap flowing. A maple tree will build upward of 40 psi in the trunk, enough to inflate a tire!

Climate change, however, is making the annual sap run shorter. It used to begin routinely in March. These days the sap may start to run in December.

People like Peter and Bert, office jockeys channeling their inner redneck by becoming maple sugar farmers? They see the facts about climate change as a challenge.

If you are like me, you love the taste of maple. Ever have maple sugar candy? When I was a child visiting my relatives in rural New Hampshire we used to buy small packages with two or three little candies made of pure maple sugar. I revived my love for these candies later on, while a student at the University of Vermont.

Maple sugar candies are totally addictive.

And, apparently, so is sugaring. Peter and Bert think so. They keep at it year after year, even though they make little profit and must put in a ton of time and energy over exhausting days and sleepless nights.

Why? Because they’re having fun. As are the many other small-time sugarmakers they know, help, and commiserate with in upstate New York and Vermont.

If you want to read a fun book about the process and learn about Pete and Bert’s adventures in sugaring, pick up The Sugar Rush.

I couldn’t put it down. And it reawakened my long-forgotten craving for pure maple sugar candy.

Peter Gregg, Sugar Rush: A Memoir of Wild Dreams, Budding Bromance, and Making Maple Syrup, Pegasus, 2024.